Dr. Jack Goldstone

And in Hong Kong, at times, they had a quarter to a third of the population engaged in protests against control from the mainland.

But the mainland was able to impose its will anyway, because no matter how many people turned out in Hong Kong, they didn't have much leverage over the government in Beijing.

So you can have a large turnout that's not effective if the government has control

leadership and military support that it can use to kind of weather the storm and put down the protests.

But then the reverse is true.

You can have a government that has already been widely seen to have failed the people.

It may be seen as kind of terribly corrupt and only interested in enriching itself.

It may be seen as incompetent, having failed to deal with some economic or military threat.

It may be seen as kind of betraying nationalist beliefs.

If you have a religious country and the government tries to go secular, this happened with the brief communist takeover in Afghanistan, which is a very religious state.

That revolutionary regime fell very quickly because people were won over to the Islamic opposition and the communist government couldn't hold on.

So if you have a government that loses support,

Then even a fairly small demonstration can kind of build, you know, people see that, hey, this government really is weak.

It doesn't have the support to really thoroughly repress a protest.

And then more people may join in and say, yeah, I'm going to get with the ball, too.

You know, I mean, I hate this government.

I'm going to get out there.

And if the government's weak, maybe this is our time to push it over.

That's kind of how things looked in Berlin in 1989, when the government didn't shoot back as people started converging on the Berlin Wall.

You know, government said, well, we're not supposed to shoot our own people.